Instead they were livened up with jaunty music - half Gipsy Kings, half Tom Waits. If it was meant to be a shocking contrast, it didn't work: the film steered away from Scylla (no violins - for heavens sake!) and drowned in Charybdis. It wasn't meant to, but at times it looked like a pop video, a ghoulish parade of war-zone chic.The instant report on the Dean of Lincoln in The Big Story (ITV) was the exact opposite: quick, trashy and effec- tive. True, there was a pathetic "recon- struction", in which solemn clerics filed into a meeting so secret it might not have taken place at all. But the Dean was able to unwrap a pretty conspiracy theory about the malicious tendency inside Lincoln Cathedral, which had been out to get him for years. It seems he had made himself unpopular trying to clean up the diocesan budget, and in this valley of debt there were canons to right of him, and canons to left. Worse, he had been aware for months that the Bishop was breathing down his neck - a clear case of harassment if ever there was one.

But of course he was far too godly to make any formal allegations to the authorities. Instead he decided to blurt it all out on prime-time television Who says the church isn't moving with the times?. TOWARDS the end of Bo Diddley's show at the Grand on Tuesday, the veteran bluesman and rock 'n' roller (born Ellas McDaniel 66 years ago), delivered a sort of doo-wop memorial lecture, listing the great names that had helped to define his kind of music over the years "Muddy Waters!" he said, and we all cheered "Bo Diddley!" he called, and we cheered even louder. "The Grateful Dead!" he said, and we exchanged worried glances, but, what the hell, we cheered anyway. By the time he shouted out "Elton John!" there was a confused silence. Bo Diddley had lost it again, or, as he eloquently put it himself earlier in a show full of prodigious ups and downs: "I done threw a rod in my crank-case My elevator stopped.

I'm gone." Whether this was a comment on the many technical difficulties - bad sound, broken strings, a workaday band - or the waning of his sexual potency, was a moot point. Certainly, it can't be easy being Bo Diddley night after night, although he's inevitably buoyed up by the formal perfection of the Bo Diddley persona. For what Bo Diddley plays is the Bo Diddley beat and his most famous song is, of course, "Hey! Bo Diddley". The props of his performance are the celebrated rectangular Bo Diddley guitar, a pair of spectacles and a brush-cut hairdo, now much less brushy and kept covered with a cowboy hat until the end. As soon as he appears, the crowd start calling out the Bo Diddley beat and he has to chide them with "Later, baby, later".

If only we knew how much later it would be. The residual power is still evident in his first real move, an awesome open chord that makes the floor vibrate, and also breaks the first of several strings. The Rolling Stones (who borrowed the beat for "Mona" and "Not Fade Away") probably have an army of technicians to deal with such emergencies, but Bo does the work himself, winding on the snake- thick bass string - until it snaps again. When he senses that we're getting restive, he moves to the front of stage and shimmies, letting out great swathes of rhythm guitar until one is conscious of nothing but ohms of burring electricity washing over you. It testifies admirably to Bo's enormous influence on power-chorded heavy metal, as well as Dick Dale surf-grunge and general all-round axe-abuse.But like the wily old pro he is, he slows us down again with some cod- reggae and slow blues, before taking over the drum-seat and tantalising us with snatches of the trademark beat Even in the encore, he still withholds the rhythm. Standing by the bar, waiting for the inevitable, I spy a middle- aged media type hunched over his drink.